“Culture” is about making collaboration an integral part of your daily work life – deliberate efforts to seek others’ opinions and feedback, being team players, sharing good and bad feedback, having leaders set a good example, rewarding teamwork, and the ethos that everything is a learning opportunity. No silos here!

“Workspace” is about having appealing and functional “meeting places” to facilitate dialogue and discussion (note: not necessarily conference rooms, but “places”), catering for workers who are located anywhere and everywhere. These days virtual meetings are the new norm, but you also have to encourage some face to face meetings where practical.

But when it comes to effective online collaboration, having the right technology is essential. Your collaboration toolkit needs to be easy to use, reliable, and accessible across all types of locations on all devices. And it needs a lot of functionality:

• Calendar
• Contact management
• Document management
• Project management
• Real-time editing
• Task management
• Video conferencing

That’s why we recommend Microsoft 365 – this cloud-based solution provides the familiar suite of Microsoft Office products such as Word, Excel and Powerpoint, and integrates them with work collaboration tools like Sharepoint, Teams and One Drive.

Teams is a chat-based, collaborative platform that is used for document sharing and online meetings. Teams is especially good for “internal” collaboration where staff are working at different locations. Special features include whiteboards, screen sharing, and reliable video calls.

Sharepoint is a web-based (intranet) system for documents, files and images. It facilitates secure sharing, content management, and workflow collaboration. It is a large file storage tool which “sits behind” Microsoft Teams.

OneDrive is your own personal secure storage space in the cloud. You can then choose to share files and folders by uploading to Sharepoint (or Teams).

So if you think your workplace can be transformed with better online collaboration tools, talk to our team about the features of Microsoft 365.